Hi there! It's been a long time, and as you all probably noticed, Vlambeer has been in somewhat of a hybernation state. Nuclear Throne took a lot out of us, and when we finally released the current U98 over a year and a half ago, we were all entirely exhausted. Since then, we've slowly been finding our footing again, and now that we're feeling creative again, we decided to return to form with an long-long-long-awaited final major update to Nuclear Throne for PC, Mac, and Linux.

We've hired YellowAfterlife (the creator of the Nuclear Throne Together mod) and worked closely with community members and feedback to create an update 99 that is worthy of the wait. While we want to stress that you shouldn't expect new content for this update, it is nevertheless significant: the game performs significantly better, is easier to mod, and a lot of quality of life and balance fixes have been introduced.

We're excited to have one more update art by the phenomenal Justin Chan, we're excited to see the meta change once more, and we've genuinely missed seeing your responses to our silly development antics. We are eternally thankful for your patience, and your sense of enthusiasm and community for the game.

As such, we're announcing an AMA over on the official Nuclear Throne Reddit for November 6th, and Update 99 will release at some time near the end of the AMA.

It's been a while, but update 98 finally seems ready. While we've done lots of testing on this build over the last few weeks, do note that the changes to this build are 'deep' enough that we can't guarantee it's 100% stable. Over the next few weeks we'll work on update 99, which will fix any issues that come up as 98 rolls out.

Most of Update 98 is balancing and fixes to issues introduced in 97, but the biggest change is the re-introduction of the Thronebutt[thronebutt.com] meta-leaderboards. Nuclear Throne now directly interfaces with the site, and that means you can keep track of your Daily and Weekly performance there.

As a fun side-note, community member lietu has been working on Throne2Speech[throne2speech.com], which sort of narrates your Nuclear Throne run using the new Thronebutt. It's still in beta, so it might not be perfect still. We're looking forward to what people create with the new stream key and Thronebutt integrations!

First of all, thank you so, so much for your support during the launch of Nuclear Throne. We know things were unexpected, and we wish we would've been capable of communicating a bit more - but such is the nature of surprise announcements.

While we're not allowed to go into specifics due to legalities and the like, we can easily say that this was by far the most successful launch in the history of Vlambeer, and such an enormous part of that was all of you on social media.

It was also by far the biggest launch we ever did, and that does mean that we're learning as we go. We're super thankful for your patience, and we're going to continue updating the game to address some issues in terms of balance, fix some things that came up before the launch and some new things that came up after it, restore Daily/Weekly functionality, and polish just a tiny bit more.

We're going to switch things up a bit now that we've reached home from PSX, release status on the game, and update 97 in our long history of updates. We'll be lowering the frequency of updates and livestreams permanently, although we'll have more information on what happens on our Twitch channel in the future. For this update, we're introducing some balancing tweaks, a lot of crash and hang fixes and introducing Steam Cloud.

Update 97 should also address problems with OSX and Linux builds on certain configurations, and if everything went OK, nobody should ever have to touch options.ini again. We also learned to never make the default pause menu option 'Quit to Menu'. Sorry!

For next update, we're going to transition the Dailies and Weeklies over to new servers, hopefully restoring those to full function for the first time after the launch. Let us know if you run into any new bugs or problems.

Balancing

A lot of tweaking to the enemies spawning on loop. Difficulty should increase throughout the areas a bit more and desert has been made slightly less ridiculous.

Enemy HP now increases less with loops.

Lil Hunter now spawns a second later, and looping decreases the spawn time less than it used to.

Lil Hunter's weaponry now gets more powerful with loops.

Hard mode now starts you out with slightly better weapons.

Tiny Gamma Guts nerf, prepared to change it back if this ruins it.

Energy Hammer now uses more ammo, spawns later, and deals more damage.

Guitar rate of fire has been slowed down a bit.

Energy Sword rate of fire has been slowed down a tiny bit.

Freak IDPD now has better guns with more spread.

Fixes

Fixed bug that started game from loadout screen with gamepads.

Fixed crash on Daily/Weekly load.

Disabled 'G'-key that made gamepads unpredictable.

Fixed Guardian point_distance bug on death in palace.

Wrote better save corruption handling, should stop game from crashing on load.

This update was supposed to go out yesterday, before the PSX announcement, but due to exhaustion I couldn't muster the energy. We're really sorry about that, and we hope 96 fixes most of the major bugs many of you have been running into. Please note that this build was uploaded from the PSX showfloor, and didn't get the normal amount of PC/Mac/Linux testing it would normally get to get it to you as soon as possible after the announcement. If you see any oddities, let us know here on the forums!

We're going to be keeping track of the forums, so let us know what else we need to fix. While the release of the game means we are generally happy with where the game is, we're not done just yet. Thanks for your patience, your support and your enthusiasm for the game, and thank you for your trust as always.